Genius tests 'annotate everything everywhere' feature

Genius, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup that made headlines earlier this week when it poached pop music critic Sasha Frere-Jones from The New Yorker and hired New Yorker contributor Christopher Glazek, has quietly made major changes in the last month—bringing on two well-connected millennials to handle P.R. and branding and testing a new feature, currently in beta, that promises to fundamentally transform the service.

The company recently hired Emily Segal as creative director and retained Audrey Gelman as a spokeswoman. Segal is a cofounder of the “trend forecasting group” K-Hole, which has among other things the distinction of coining the term “normcore” (read more here if you must). Gelman, who has been profiled by The New York Times and The New York Observer, handled the press for Scott Stringer’s successful comptroller campaign two years ago, and inspired Allison Williams’ character on HBO’s “Girls,” now heads the “Millennial Strategy” division at strategic communications firm SKDKnickerbocker, where she is a senior vice president.

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The company has often received bad press in the past—both as a result of the antics of cofounder Mahbod Moghadam (who was finally ousted from the company last May) and the site's early reputation as a place where white people mock rap lyrics. Genius could certainly use a rebrand and a better media strategy, especially as it prepares to introduce its new web annotation feature to the public—but its next moves could prove much bigger even than that.

Genius (formerly Rap Genius, and before that, Rap Exegesis) started life as a lyrics annotation site that let people upload the lyrics to rap songs and then leave notes explaining their meanings. The site soon expanded to other genres of music and then other types of text, such as poetry, speeches, and the like. In May 2013, it launched News Genius, a section of the site in which the text of major news stories could be posted and annotated. Last July, it added the ability to embed annotatable text into other websites.

Earlier this month, though, the company quietly introduced what could become its most significant feature—the ability to annotate any page on the web. Currently in beta testing, the new functionality lets users add genius.com/ to the beginning of any URL to access a version of the page on Genius. The page is fully annotatable, so users can highlight and annotate any text on the page and view others’ annotations.

Right now, only a small group of beta testers—among them Genius employees, longtime users of the platform, Andreessen Horowitz partners Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, and Fusion editor Felix Salmon—have the ability to actually create annotations on web pages, but anyone can view them.

This feature brings Genius close to its stated goal to “annotate the world.” When Andreessen first invested in Genius back in October 2012, he said that he wanted the company to eventually develop technology that could annotate any page on the web. It was a technology he had first thought about building in 1993, when he created the first web browser, Mosaic. But the feature was scrapped before Mosaic was released.

“I often wonder how the Internet would have turned out differently if users had been able to annotate everything … 20 years later, Rap Genius finally gives us the opportunity to find out,” he wrote in a post on Genius.

The web page annotation feature that Genius introduced earlier this month seems to fulfill Andreessen’s vision—with one exception: users are required to go through Genius.com to annotate other web sites’ pages. When someone views a NYTimes.com article in Genius (such as this one), they are visiting Genius rather than NYTimes.com, even if much of the content is coming from NYTimes.com.

In many ways, Genius’ web annotation feature is a new form of aggregation, and like older forms of news aggregation, it raises questions about the relationship between content producers and aggregators. Just a few years ago, there were serious debates about whether aggregators like The Huffington Post and Gawker were “stealing” traffic and ad revenue from newspapers. In March 2011, The New York Times' then-executive editor Bill Keller memorably compared The Huffington Post’s business model to that of Somali pirates.

In the past, Genius has been accused of stealing content. Back when it was just a lyrics site, it hosted song lyrics uploaded by users without paying to license the lyrics from music publishers. Though this is a common practice among free lyrics sites, it is technically illegal since the lyrics are copyrighted. Last May, Genius finally settled with the music publishers and began licensing lyrics.

But Genius’ web annotation feature will have a more complex effect on news sites’ revenue models. A source inside the company told Capital that visiting a site’s web page in Genius will still trigger a hit (and presumably revenue from display ads) for the site being annotated. The source also said that Genius cannot be used to bypass online publications’ hard paywalls. Unlike Google cache, Genius is accessing a live version of the page, so attempts to view paywalled content—such as a Financial Times article or Capital Pro content—in Genius will just show (an annotatable version of) a website’s standard “This article requires a subscription” message.

So it seems Genius is not taking away traffic and ad revenue from news sites, though it is taking away a measure of control. Since Genius does not require news sites to implement their technology on the sites themselves—instead routing the annotations through Genius.com—there is no way for news sites to opt out of the feature.

An annotation left on a Vox.com article by Timothy Lee about Genius’ pitch to news organizations touts this as a feature—and itself provides an example: “Even if annotation is a feature that users and website operators want, Genius will face a second challenge: convincing sites to use Genius' own technology instead of building their own,” Lee writes in the article.

If you view the article in Genius, you can see that a beta tester with the username Vesuvius has highlighted the above passage and added an annotation with a message to other websites: “It isn’t the website’s choice. They don’t need to be persuaded. They are being annotated.”